I have been using ICICI Direct for a little over a year now. First, a brief disclaimer: I have used US-based online trading platforms and websites before, and perhaps that has colored my perceptions and increased my expectations of what a trading website should be like anywhere in the world.
The problems with ICICI Direct are numerous. Let us start with its pitiful bag of "services" on offer. First, its brokerage charges are nearly 3-4 times as much as that of other broking firms. The reason is because of the "greater levels of service offered by ICICI Direct", according to the suave and slightly slimy salesperson who sold me the account. This apparently pays for the 24-hour customer care service via e-mail and phone.
In my experience, the customer care is grossly incompetent - on average it takes over 5 days to reply to an e-mail. I have been reduced to mentioning in each e-mail that "without their prompt service, I’d have to escalate the process to RBI via their ombudsman scheme". Apparently, it’s only with these magic words that I can somehow manage to obtain their attention.
As for order confirmation, last year it took them 14 days to confirm my purchase of some units of a "liquid fund"(yes, the one which takes 1 day to buy and 1 day to redeem). The fund purchase happened in fact only after I mailed them twice and called their customer service numbers millions of times.
Not only is the customer service incompetent, it is ignorant to boot. I asked them a question about ETF purchases and redemptions, to which they stated that ICICI Direct does not offer the capability to trade in ETFs. The following very day, I used their service to purchase some units of Benchmark’s Nifty ETF, which simply shows the level of commitment and knowledge displayed by the customer service.
The most crucial factor in my deciding to opt for some competing service is that when in need, the ICICI Direct website stops working. It freezes in the middle of trades. It gives "server connection" errors. There have been hundreds of times when I have been locked out in the middle of a trade simply because of the site’s failure. This has caused me **losses worth thousands of rupees.
The fact that there are a large number of customers for the service is not an excuse in not being able to provide scalable services. Having lots of customers is a happy problem to have; having previously worked in the IT industry, I know it does not take a lot of effort to create a scalable service that can cater to millions of customers parallelly. The fact that ICICI has deliberately decided not to invest in upgrading its infrastructure **show the level of commitment and care with which it looks upon its customers.
I would like to clear a misconception among the amateur traders that are reading this website: you can, and very well should, have more than one trading account, preferably in multiple markets. This is the starting point of diversifying your risk; entering the markets without doing so is very risky and could potentially lead to large losses. You will have in any case signed off on ICICI Direct’s terms and conditions in which you’ll have agreed to not hold the firm responsible for any outages and service failures. The best way to diversify that risk away is by maintaining multiple accounts.
To sum up: **ICICI Direct is grossly, criminally incompetent and displays a totally lackadaisical attitude towards its customers. All customers would do well to remember that it’s a free market and you have other choices.
*PS: As I’m writing this, ICICI Direct has not been working for the last hour and a half. This is when I’m using a 2 Mbps dedicated connection. I am pretty sure that my intra-day positions will have been automatically closed off by now(2.45 PM), and I shall have suffered huge losses for which the company is morally responsible. It’s a crying shame.